Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/245

 with the original British colonies of North America I need not point out.

But while fully admitting that Science has thus performed the greatest of miracles in bringing those who are divided by a world's breadth of waters into daily communion, I am far from seeing my way to the acceptance of any scheme of legislative union between England and her colonies that has yet been formulated. To my mind all these plans start on a false hypothesis. Herbert Spencer, in his felicitous manner, illustrates the evils of what he calls over-legislation by the instance of a man who slips and falls on the pavement. The crowd, instead of letting him lie quiet, immediately jerk him up, and probably increase the injury he has already received. In the same way, we feel there is something unsatisfactory in the relation between England and the colonies, and so we urge all sorts of violent remedies without pausing to consider that they might fatally dislocate the body politic. Nearly all of these schemes, however, are variations of one central idea—the establishment of an "imperial" something-or-other in London. Some of our would-be reformers propose that the colonies should send, in the ratio of their population, representatives to the